There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Page A

payment, telling the woman we wanted the goat alive. “Don’t worry,” she answered, “I’m not bloodying my hands for you.” That evening we brought the little goat home,
and then began the tough summer days: mowing the grass, weeding the plot, grooming the potato plants, and all of this at the same pace as experienced Anisya—we’d arranged with her that we’d take half the goats’ manure, and somehow or other we fertilized the plot, but our vegetables still grew poorly and mostly produced weeds. Baba Anisya, freed from mowing grass, would tie up the big goat and its little kindergarten in a place where we could see them, and then scramble off into the woods for mushrooms and berries, after which she’d come by our plot and examine the fruits of our labor. We had to replant the dill, which we’d planted too deeply; we needed it for pickling cucumbers. The potatoes flourished mostly above ground level. My mother and I read The Guide to Planting and Sowing, and my father finally finished his work in the forest, and we went to look at his new home. It turned out to be someone’s hut, which my father had refurbished by putting in window frames, glass, and doors, and covering the roof with tar. The house was empty. From then on at night we carried tables and benches and crates and buckets and iron pots and pans and our remaining supplies, and hid everything. My father was digging a basement there, almost an underground home with a stove, our third. There were already some young vegetables peeking out of the earth in his garden.
    My mother and I over the summer had become rough peasants. Our fingers were hard, with tough thick nails, permanently blackened with earth, and most interesting of all was that at the base of our nails we’d developed some sort of calluses. I noticed that Anisya had the same thing on her
fingers, as did Marfutka, who didn’t do anything, and even Tanya, our lady of leisure, a former nurse, had them too. Speaking of which, at this point Tanya’s most frequent visitor, Vera, the shepherdess, hung herself in the forest. She wasn’t actually a shepherdess anymore—all the sheep had been eaten long ago—and also she had a secret, which Anisya, who was very angry with Tanya, now told us: Vera always called for tea when she was coming into the village, but what Tanya gave Vera was some kind of medicine, which she couldn’t live without, and that’s why she hung herself: she had no money anymore for medicine. Vera left behind a little daughter. Anisya, who had contact with Tarutino, the neighboring village, told us that the girl was living with her grandmother, but then it emerged that the grandmother was another Marfutka, only with a drinking problem, and so the little girl, already half insane, was brought home the next day by our mother in an old baby stroller.
    My mother always needed more than the rest of us, and my father was angry because the girl wet her bed and never said a word, licked her snot, didn’t understand anything, and cried at night for hours. Pretty soon none of us could live or sleep for these nighttime screams, and my father went off to live in the woods. There wasn’t much for it but to go and give the girl back to her failed grandmother, but just then this same grandmother, Faina, appeared and, swaying on her feet, began demanding money for the girl and the stroller. In reply my mother went inside and brought out Lena, combed, showered, barefoot but in a clean dress. At this point Lena suddenly threw herself at my mother’s feet, without a word, but like a
grown-up, curling herself up in a ball and putting her arms around my mother’s bare ankles. Her grandmother began to cry and left without Lena and without the baby stroller—apparently, to die. She swayed on her feet as she walked and wiped her tears away with her fist—but she swayed not from drink but from hunger, as I later figured out. She didn’t have any supplies—after all her daughter Vera hadn’t